Immunizations are a safe and effective way to prevent dangerous diseases. Every child should be protected against diseases that can cause brain damage, paralysis, deafness, blindness, cancer, and even death.

Newborn babies are immune to many diseases because they have antibodies they received from their mothers. However, this immunity goes away during the first year of life. Also, young children do not have this "maternal immunity" against some diseases, such as whooping cough.

If an unvaccinated child is exposed to a disease germ, the child's body may not be strong enough to fight the disease. Before vaccines, many children died from diseases that vaccines now prevent, such as whooping cough, measles, and polio. Those same germs exist today, but because babies are now protected to vaccines, we do not see these diseases nearly as often.

Immunizing individual children also helps to protect the health of our community, especially those people who cannot be immunized. These include children who are too young to be vaccinated (for example; children less than a year old cannot receive the measles vaccine but can be infected by the measles virus), those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons (for example; children with leukemia), and those who cannot make an adequate response to vaccination.

CHILDHOOD IMMUNIZATIONS

All infants should complete their basic series of immunizations before the age of 2 years. However, if your child has received no immunizations or only part of them, it is not too late to start or finish for complete protection.